People will always want to be entertained, and therefore, there will always be SOME form of popular culture. Otherwise life would be very boring, I should think.

Maybe life wouldn't be so "boring" if consumer society actually offered people something more meaningful than the endless rut of work-consumption, work-consumption. That's why it's called "alienation." Otherwise, people wouldn't need to rely on passive entertainments (which are just commodities), but on self-actualization of their true potentials in place of dispossession and passive consumption.

"The SPECTATOR'S ALIENATION from and submission to the contemplated object (which is the outcome of his unthinking activity) works like this: the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more readily he recognizes his own needs in the images of need proposed by the dominant system, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The spectacle's externality with respect to the acting subject is demonstrated by the fact that the individual's own gestures are no longer his own, but rather those of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere." The Society of the Spectacle, Thesis 30.